The Voodoo You Do - So Well by Tim Fish is among the works in "No Straight Lines," a history of gay comics by Justin Hall.

The Voodoo You Do - So Well by Tim Fish is among the works in "No Straight Lines," a history of gay comics by Justin Hall.

Photo: Tim Fish, No Straight Lines

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Christine Smith is one of the female cartoonists in the book. These are panels from her strip "The Princess."

Christine Smith is one of the female cartoonists in the book. These are panels from her strip "The Princess."

Photo: Christine Smith, No Straight Lines

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Justin Hall traces the history of gay comics and gay rights.

Justin Hall traces the history of gay comics and gay rights.

Photo: Christopher Nash

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"No Straight Lines" is a history of gay comics and the gay rights movement.

"No Straight Lines" is a history of gay comics and the gay rights movement.

Photo: Maurice Vellekoop, Fantagraphics Books

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'No Straight Lines' - gay comics history

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When people talk about the history of the gay rights movement, they often focus on a rather prescribed set of lines. Lines about progress, the lines outside Stonewall, sometimes just plain old picket lines.

But in all this talk about lines, historians often forget to mention some very important ones: the ink brushed, penned, even dotted lines that filled queer comic books and etched the movement's early reflections onto an ever-changing paper trail.

Snapshots of this trail have been collected in San Francisco cartoonist Justin Hall's "No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics" (Fantagraphics Books, $35), an anthology published last month.

Aside from offering what his peers have called a groundbreaking cross-section of queer comix, comics, zines and graphic novels, Hall's book provides a striking example of how entwined the history and literature of the gay rights movement have been since the early days of the battle.

"It's this strange parallel," Hall says. "The modern queer rights movement really begins with Stonewall. But at the same moment as Stonewall - the same year, essentially - is the moment when underground comics developed in the San Francisco Bay Area."

Hall isn't talking about comics like the Peanuts or Archie. His work is concerned with alternative comics, comics whose early manifestations were sometimes spelled with an "x." They proliferated in the progressive presses of the 1970s and '80s, reacting against censorship by groups like the Comics Code Authority, which barred just about anything in cartoons that wasn't lily white and family friendly.

Under the radar, alternative comic artists filled the medium with color. From the basements of radical feminist karate studios and the dens of hippie communes, the artists in the beginning of Hall's book wrote about the plight of women, blacks and of course, the gays and lesbians whose faces were never shown in mainstream superhero comics so popular at the time.

Howard Cruse, profiled in Hall's work as the "godfather of queer comics," says he felt motivated to cover gay issues after stumbling upon the Stonewall riots in New York. Cruse was already a cartoonist, but he felt coming out would jeopardize his prospects as a young illustrator in a closeted industry.

"Most gay and lesbian cartoonists of my generation grew up on the assumption that you would have to compartmentalize. If you wanted to have a cartooning career, you could not be out, because there was a forced invisibility in mainstream comics," he says.

In the aftermath of Stonewall, Cruse realized that his sexuality was not unnatural, despite what everyone had told him growing up a preacher's son in Alabama. He wanted to come out to his cartoon audience, but that fear for his career - and a 1973 Supreme Court decision that allowed communities to crack down on materials they considered obscene - meant that he'd have to wait.

The story was different in San Francisco, where Trina Robbins, who still describes herself as "lily white straight," did not have to wait. In 1972, having penned the country's first lesbian comic that was neither derogatory nor erotic, she published "Sandy Comes Out," a light yet liberating story based on a friend's reckoning with her sexuality after moving to the Bay Area.

"It didn't seem all that revolutionary at the time," Robbins says. "But I wasn't surrounded by straight company."

Her company was emblematic of 1970s San Francisco. Robbins swam in a plash of lesbians, artists and radicals, collaborating with a local publisher called Last Gasp to produce the Wimmen's Comix collective, whose inaugural issue included "Sandy Comes Out."

Hall writes that Robbins' comic made history, even if it didn't seem pioneering to her. The story, he writes, was "the proverbial stone dropped in the pond, creating ripples that eventually grew into an LGBT comics movement."

Yet the movement Robbins helped forge - much like the LGBT movement itself - lacked respect in the mainstream.

"I feel like it's kind of where novels were in the beginning of the 19th century," Hall says, describing a time when "serious" works were written as essays or in epic poetry, an era when writers like Jane Austen were viewed as inconsequential dabblers in some silly "women's thing."

Nevertheless, the comic and queer movements pushed forward, and in 1980, when the threat of obscenity and his fear of coming out to his audience had waned, Cruse helped Kitchen Sink Press owner Denis Kitchen put out a landmark publication called Gay Comix. The creators sought stories with "emotional authenticity" about "people, not genitals."

Over the next 18 years, 25 issues of Gay Comix would be released. Through those many pages, the serial would establish itself as the vanguard of the queer comics movement, perhaps as a sign of its growing acceptance drop the "x" from its name, and reflect the shifting picture of LGBT people.

The groundwork for queer comics was set, but the medium and its messages would perpetually transform. "No Straight Lines" captures this progression, moving from punks' do-it-yourself zines printed on cheap photocopiers to the emergence of trans coming-out stories on the Internet in the beginnings of the new millennium.

The collection comes at a moment when queer characters are beginning to appear in mainstream comics: Many point to the introduction of Kevin Keller, Archie's out gay character, and Northstar, Marvel's now-betrothed, openly gay superhero, as signs of more temperate times when alternative presses might no longer be necessary.

But Hall, grateful as he is for these mainstream developments, fears that gay character debuts on the glossy pages of big production house comics might lead readers to forget about all the others who came before, in mimeographed, hastily drawn sketches.

And so, enter "No Straight Lines." It is an ambitious project, and Hall says he recognizes the limitations of trying to compile an anthology covering such an expanse of time in such a diverse community.

"You can't make one definitive statement," he says, and he could be talking about queers or comics. "But that's actually kind of exciting."